The Book of Human Skin (9 page)

I could not understand it. By then I had spent time helping the
Fatebenefratelli
at the hospital, I had read my Galen, my Avicenna, my tracts on all the diseases of dampness that commonly afflicted Venetians and soldiers. My pockets were full of useful herbs; my head was bursting with useful detail.Yet even on the rare occasions when someone allowed me to spout my knowledge, they just sighed regretfully. One surgeon went so far as to say, ‘If only . . .’ before he dismissed me.

‘If only what?’ I begged.

He shook his head. It was his servant, a youth of my own age, who kindly explained the truth to me as he showed me out the door.

‘Youse too thin and poor-looking. The poor Venetians caint afford themselves a doctor. Or they go to the Jews. The rich Venetians wants somethin plump and pretty to look at when they’re ailing or pretending to. A young surgeon’s a sweet entertainment to them.A little flirtation makes ’em feel more better than physic. Youse too poor-mouth, and too serious, boy! It will not do. You need to find a country surgeon to apprentice on, and put yourself around some decent food while youse about it.’

‘May I look in the hall mirror?’ I asked the boy. I had none at my disposal in the doorways, boats and outhouses where I slept.

He patted my shoulder sympathetically as I learned the truth of his diagnosis. I looked uncared-for, which I was, and starved, equally true. Worse, I looked tragic, as if I were somehow bleeding invisibly from the heart. Given my own dilapidation, how could others believe that I might be capable of curing them?

I took the boy’s advice. I made my way out of Venice, by fishing-boat, foot and cart. I felt deep dry earth crunching beneath my feet for the first
time. I followed the rumours of vacant posts until I found myself a Master, Doctor Ruggiero, an irascible general surgeon in rural circumstances near Stra. There I would drink my fill of cow-warm milk and eat my height in mounds of cheap polenta. And there I would learn the Small-Pox, the Cow-Pox, scything gashes and other country ailments. And, though I could not guess it then, a shocking gunshot wound and an attempted murder would also come my way in the gentle green hills of the Veneto.

Sor Loreta

One morning I was at my solitary devotions in my cell, when suddenly there shot out of my crucifix five blood-red rays that pierced my heart, forehead, feet and hands. The burning pain made me swoon. I had a sensation of my soul rising in flight with the speed of a bullet. Exactly so had Teresa of Avila described the sensations of her Transverberation. I felt my body floating irresistibly upwards, towards where my soul soared.

When I came to myself, I saw with joy that God had not only pierced my heart and entrails with His love, but He had also awarded me the stigmata. Now I too bore the immortally fresh marks of Jesus’s crucifixion on my hands, feet and forehead. I sent a
samba
running to fetch the
priora
, so that I might begin on the path to sainthood right there and then. I hoped Bishop Chávez de la Rosa himself would be summoned to witness. The
priora
arrived, panting, in a disagreeable frame of mind.

‘Behold!’ I announced, pointing to the red holes in my limbs.

‘Behold what?’ she demanded rudely. I divined that I had interrupted her at one of her many light and pleasurable activities. Next I indicated the halo that hovered behind my head since my stigmatization.

‘So you painted a yellow circle on your cell wall,’ she sneered, ‘to sit in front of.’

Then I realized that I had just witnessed the proof of her unenlightenment.
Naturally
she could not see my stigmata or halo. She was not a blessed person.

‘I pity you that you are blind to God’s miracles,’ I told her calmly. She stormed off.

Nor was anyone else at Santa Catalina worthy to see the mark of the Most High upon me. They stubbornly worshipped Sor Andreola, with her showy white light, and ignored the subtler mark of the Lord’s love imprinted on my skin. In fact, my invisible stigmata gave them one more reason to laugh at me.

I comforted myself that Santa Catalina herself had suffered the same oppression. Her stigmata could be seen by no one but herself during her lifetime. She was content that it should be so. The opinion of the coarse rabble was meaningless for her. Yet after her death – then everyone saw the marks, and knew that she had been right and they had been wrong, and they were sorry and ashamed in more ways than I can write down.

Minguillo Fasan

My mother had entreated, ‘You will be kind to her, won’t you, Minguillo?’

The trouble was every single thing about my sister queued up to make me not so.

There was the will, of course, brooding in my father’s unattended desk. The Empathetical Reader shall feel as if upon His own skin the chafe of its most hurtful revelation: that Marcella would some day inherit my adored Palazzo Espagnol and I would be reduced to her lowly dependent.

The infant girl herself raised my wrath by her very bitch-sized being.The smaller and more pathetical she seemed, the greater my ire in proportion, for the grosser was the injustice in that scrap being preferred to myself.

From the beginning, as I’ve explained, I got no more than glimpses of Marcella, usually being snatched hastily out of my sight. My blurred image from these encounters was of a milky little thing, a skinnymalink, a shedder of silent tears, a lowerer of lashes, a wearer of the palest pink. She was a hand-clinger and a singer of breathy snatches of little songs. The servants sighed over her. She never had, in any perfection, her health.

She did not appear to trouble anyone with precocious teems of brain, yet there were times when Marcella seemed much older than her years, like a statue in miniature of a saint or one of those loathsome wax dolls with a grown-up face. Her great joy in life was drawing on scraps of paper. I’ll admit she showed an early talent for a likeness, but her pictures were as wispy as herself, the pencil barely touching the page.As if she could not even do that
hard
.And when she lost the use of her leg, she was just like a damaged kitten, she did not have the least idea of protecting herself. However, let us not anticipate that interesting event.

From infancy, Marcella sought the dim humiliation of obscurity the way the rain seeks the earth. Shady corners, the underbellies of beds were the places where one would most often find her. She was the second sister in every way, a second, paler printing from the same incised plate as our older sister, Riva, deceased. Marcella’s were the same lineaments indistinctly placed and nuanced where Riva had been strong and vibrant.Though not for long, of course.

That incompleteness ran right through Marcella. She seemed to me a little deaf, as if her tiny ears had not been properly formed. Look at those delicate cast-down eyelids! They lacked the slash of black lashes that had defined Riva’s dark smoulderers, even on her deathbed, even when her mysterious illness had excavated her belly and

Here I desist for the sake of the Squeamish Reader, who need not bother Himself, in any case, with a character who will feature no more in this story. Forget I mentioned her. So.

Marcella weaned at a politely young age and learned the use of the chamber pot.Yet at five she started waking in wet sheets. It appeared that her internal organs were deficient in the valves that should have been of unquestionable function. The maid Anna started up with the known wisdoms, dry suppers, bathing the spine at bedtime with equal parts of ammonia and alcohol, followed by hand friction with a red cloth.Through the keyhole, I saw the skin of Marcella’s back painfully exalted to the texture of veal fillet pummelled for the pan.

Then there was the daytime occasional mishap when Marcella forgot to listen to the calls of nature. Or when she was prevented from attending to them. For it was in this frailty that I found my first entertainment.

Our scene is the courtyard. Having hidden her chamber pot, and nailed down the lid of the commode in her bedchamber, I would wait down near the necessary room.When I saw her making her uncertain way towards it, I would hurry in ahead of her, and take my time, watching her from the arrow-slot in the wall, into which I had inserted a sliver of mirror. I stood by my spy-hole, drinking in every momentary spasm of discomfort that creased her face, her wretched, restless pacing, her tense sitting-down on the bench with her bony little knees pressed together inside the sheath of pink silk. Even if she grew so desperate as to presume to tap tentatively on the door, I would hold back, not acknowledging her until she was obliged to tap again and louder. I heard the catch of her breath as she shocked herself by uttering a truly audible noise.Then, from behind the door, I would reproach her for indelicacy.

Eventually I would open up. I stood in the doorway with my arms crossed and dragged a lazy glance over her while she shifted from foot to foot, not daring to meet my eyes because she knew that a long parley with me would only extend her agony. Her brain was by now riveted to the rhythmic stab of need in her lower pelvis (I had brought myself to that point more than once, so that I could really taste the ecstasy of her suffering).

‘Please, Minguillo, may I enter?’ She indicated the desired room behind me with a shaking, translucent finger.

‘Why?’

And here she was truly trapped because she absolutely could not frame the actual words in front of a man, and because she knew that in honour her brother of all men should not ask it of her either. I allowed her to shoulder that part of the guilt, to think that she personally had inspired this behaviour in me, through a fissure in her own decency. Look at that little pink lip trembling. See the tears tadpoling on the lashes. In the lower centre of her body the prods and shrieks of need grew visibly louder and more urgent. She buckled at the knee and her eyes started to turn up in her head.

Just once, I had made her faint and had left her there to wake in streaming ignominy.And that was enough to make her understand that I could do it at any time.

So after another minute I would let her pass, tousling her soft head with my hand as she slipped under my arm. It was the only part of my sister that I ever touched.

The only part of her I touched with my own hands, that is.

Marcella Fasan

The first moment of my sentient life was the one when my brother wrenched my kitten from my arms and threw it into the Grand Canal. It was not the sudden violence nor the piteous mew that were the revelation: it was my parents’ defenceless faces when Gianni, soaked through and clutching the kitten to his heaving chest, told them what had happened. I remember their figures in stone-still silhouette against the brilliance of the nursery window. I lay in my cot, listening.

Minguillo said, ‘I wanted to see if cats float.’

The kitten sneezed mightily, climbed down Gianni’s leg and returned to my cot.

Minguillo remarked, ‘As you see, they do.’

My parents flinched. They would not look at my brother, or at Gianni, or at me, or at one another.

Then my beloved godfather Piero Zen strode into the room. He ignored Minguillo, reached into my cot and took both me and the kitten into his arms. My parents broke from their miserable trance and crowded around me, taking turns to hug me and kiss the kitten’s little nose.

My little hands stroked the kitten’s wet fur and it purred forgivingly. But when it was well and dry, I asked Anna to take it down to the kitchen and not to bring it back to me. I had just learned, and the lesson was not wasted upon me, that existence would never be secure for any vulnerable creature who visibly loved me.

Piero just knew. There are men that do.

I never told him the whole truth about Minguillo’s tortures, and that
never seemed to matter. Piero just knew to interpose himself between me and my brother at every possible moment and in a way that made the intervention seem unconscious.

‘Fancy a little turn in the courtyard?’ he would ask in his pleasantly cracked voice, as if he knew that if he accompanied me down there Minguillo would not come between me and the necessary room.

Piero’s was the first portrait I drew, as soon as I could hold a pencil. He claimed it was a perfect likeness, and had it set in a silver frame. But I think in truth it was a fair portrait of a tall and slender wading bird, like a heron, if one could imagine a heron with the kindest face and most delicate plumage. For Piero was tall and so very slender that you could see even his skeleton was fragile. His clothes did nothing but trap packets of air around his thinness. Despite his high birth, he seemed almost apologetic about his lack of substance, stooping somewhat, stammering a little. He sometimes walked with a hand on his narrow hip, as if to reinforce its strength. His eyes were pale green and none too large; his hair that pallid sandy red that generally displeases fashionable society. His eyelashes were too weak to make a visible appearance, and his eyebrows swooped in a light, ironic arch.

Yet give Piero someone to defend, someone weaker than himself, and he was superb.

From my observations of Piero above, it is easy to see what kind of child I would grow into. I was a very little girl when it came to me that I, who could as yet only watch, might usefully employ myself by chronicling what happened to the people around me. It seemed to me that people often let extraordinary stories pass through them quite unheeded.

There should be a book about everyone
, I thought, watching and watching. And my habit of watching gave me the idea to keep a diary of my own life, so as not to lose it in all the commotion of the more interesting stories of others. I first kept my diary in laborious sketches and then, when I learned to write, in words.

My pictures I gave to those who were kind to me. I even tried to court love by making portraits of my mother, her likeness snatched in glimpses during brief visits to the nursery. I fear that I was too young to dissemble, and that my pictures of her did not please, being principally depictions of elaborate hairstyles foaming around a blank face. Still, I handed them to her, trustingly, hopefully.